Last Rights Read Online Free Page A

boys, both in reserved occupations, were generous to my
     lads. But it was still a frightening and depressing way to send off a loved one. So many trophies of war all around. I could
     see the shrapnel embedded in some of the trees and memorials, even if the bereaved could not. I could see a foot I remember
     too – lying all white and lonely on top of a watering can. But no one else saw it so maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe it
     was just a foot left over from the Somme, still lodged in my mind like a splinter.
    Aggie had only been home for five minutes from her shift down at Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory when the sirens went off. I’d
     dropped Walter at his lodgings after the funeral, but Arthur was still with us so yet again he went down with Mum, the girls
     and this time Doris too.
    I went up on the roof. Something made me not go so far on this occasion. Perhaps I was afraid of meeting wild-eyed fighting
     men again or maybe I just wanted to watch people doing something rather than sitting in a hole in the ground. There’s a fire-watching
     post on the next roof, over the bank. Mr Deeks, the manager, is in charge. ‘Good evening, Mr Hancock,’ he said to me, as he
     watched me lie down on the flat bit of roof over Aggie’s bedroom.
    ‘G-Good evening, Mr, er, D-Deeks,’ I replied.
    I saw him smile briefly before he and his lads went on about their business. He must have thought I was mad, lying down on
     a roof in a raid – no tin hat, no gas-mask, nothing. He must have thought I had some sort of death-wish. Depending on the
     day, sometimes he’s on the money there.
    As the throbbing drone of the bombers came ever closer, I shut my eyes. I’ve always thought that if I’m going to die, I don’t
     want to have to watch myself do it. Sometimes people ask me whether or not I’m afraid of death and my answer always surprises
     them. I am. Just because it’s familiar to me, just because sometimes I even want it, doesn’t mean I can’t fear it. How can
     you not fear something you know nothing about?
    But this time closing my eyes had a bad effect. I kept seeing that bloke I’d met the night before, the one who said he’d been
     stabbed. I hadn’t thought about him much since, but now here he was in colour and detail like a frightening villain in a creepy
     picture. Just his face, twisted in anger, playing over and over in my mind until I couldn’t bear it any more and had to open
     my eyes. Even then, I think now, I was starting to feel guilty about him.
    What I saw, the blackness of the night pierced by the searchlights picking out the even blacker ranks of bombers, was really
     a lot more frightening than anything in my head. But I preferred it because it was real. When I was in the trenches, just
     waiting as we could do for months sometimes before actually fighting, one of the worst things was not being able to see the
     enemy. You know they’re there – you can hear them, feel the fear comingfrom them, even smell them at times – but you can’t see them and gradually you build hideous pictures in your mind of things
     more monster than human. When you go over the top you’re half mad with fear, which, maybe, was the whole point of all that.
     After all, what sane person would climb over a mountain of mud, then throw himself willingly at thousands of men armed with
     guns?
    The noise was so loud it felt as if it was in your body. Explosion – like the sound of silk ripping across the sky – the crackling
     of the fires, Mr Deeks’s lads shouting at each other. ‘Where the bloody hell are our guns?’ one asked. But no one could answer,
     because no one knows. There’s only ‘taking it’, which we do every night and sometimes in the daytime too. The East End taking
     it for the whole country, mopping up pain like a sponge. Christ, it’s only been a matter of weeks all this, but sometimes
     I think that at the end there’ll be nothing left – only flatness, the whole place gone back